A philosopher's stone or lapis philosophorum is a legendary substance capable of turning lead into gold. It is my hope that this blog will polish some of my (and possible yours as well) rough and confused philosophical musings into nuggets of things more valuable.

Friday, May 18, 2012

This is an interesting video blog on
metametaphysics. Here's something the two philosophers did not
explicitly mention: one way to cash out grounding or the
fundamentality relation may be the cutting-nature-at-its-joints talk.

Perhaps an analogy would serve an
explanatory purpose here. Some paintings are abstract, like say,
cubism. Cubism still represents reality but perhaps not as accurately
as say, a photo or a more fine grained painting. The cubist
representations don't cut nature at its joints but does manage to
pick out the same structures as the photo.

But I tend to have pragmatically
inspired worries. Perhaps what we determine to be fundamental may
largely depend on what we have uses for. So say numbers are often
posited to exist because they serve useful purposes but if we can
jettison them for something else that can do the job better (or maybe
we manage to abandon whatever the job they serve to describe
completely) we may not view them as fundamental or even real anymore.
They don't cut nature at its joints at all; nature has no number
joints.

Maybe tables, chairs and even people do
not cut nature at its joints or at least cut it less fundamentally
than more natural objects (perhaps subatomic particles or the cosmos
as a whole?).

More specifically, say, tables are
posited to exist because they serve an important role in society but
table-chair composites do not and thus we may not see it as
fundamental or as real as the table and chair individually. The table
is physically separated from the chair, of course, but we posit the
existence of many things that have parts vastly spatially separate
from other parts (the solar system, e.g.). That may be because the
solar system plays such an important roles in our society, our
sciences and so forth. Likewise, the left-half of the table is seen
as less fundamental or real as the whole table perhaps because it
serves a smaller function for us. But say someday we stop using whole
tables for whatever reason but find major indispensable uses of
half-tables and forget all about whole tables. Will we then see whole
tables as we do like table-chairs?

It may be more difficult to jettison
the usage of some things than others because they are so culturally
and socially and personally ingrained.

But pragmatic considerations come in
degrees (which may explain the fundamentality or grounding relation)
and are relative to societies and times (which may undermine
essentialism or neo-aristotelianism).

Perhaps the sciences offer the best analogy here. At one time, Newtonian mechanics was a model that was thought to describe reality. But when Einstein came along, his model was then seen by scientists and common folk as a more accurate model which is more fundamental in a sense than Newton's. Scientists don't want to say that Newton was wrong maybe because his model still has practical applications in society. But say, one day, a model of physics will render both Newton and Einstein's theory useless (as an explanatory or any other kinds of tool such as a handmaiden for developing new technologies, say) and posit laws and objects that are so different from anything these two physicists posited that people may forget those other theories and call them false.

Here, you can say that it is because the new theory more accurately represents reality than the former two or you can say that it has more usages that the previous theories it has supplanted does not. What reasons do we have for the former explanation than the later?